a) "The Loudest Voice"
I haven't seen the Christian Bale as Dick Cheney movie yet, but it seems about as pointless as this miniseries where Russell Crowe plays Roger Ailes. Setting aside that it's not that impressive for a 3 star asshole like Crowe to put on about 10 pounds and play a 5 star asshole, it's just not nuanced or revelatory enough to be interesting -- if I had to write a script about Ailes with no time to research, it would be a lot like this, which is to say it's exactly what you'd expect with a surface level understanding of his life and Fox News. Maybe that means the show is lazy or poorly written, or just that the truth is depressingly obvious and self-evident, but either way it makes me wonder if they shouldn't have bothered.

b) "Years And Years"
"Years And Years" is a really unique show, I've never seen anything quite like it. On one hand, it's kind of a standard family drama tracing a British family through different eras of their lives. On the other hand, the story starts in 2019 and moves several years into the future, setting the Lyon family saga against a backdrop of political and economic collapse to come, with Emma Thompson as the wealthy businesswoman who eventually becomes Prime Minister after stumbling into a political career by blurting out offensive things on television. That character plays an interesting role in the show, because it's not about her or her inner life -- you only see Thompson as she appears in public or on TV, from the perspective of the Lyonses. And she's not exactly a Trump joke -- in fact the most terrifying thing about the show as it speeds through the years is you see Trump get re-elected, nuke a Chinese territory, and then help Mike Pence get elected as the next POTUS. It all plays out just plausibly enough to be really stressful to watch. I don't know if Thompson's character is eventually going to save the world or if she's as awful as she seems, I feel like I won't be able to say whether I loved this show or hated it until I see how it ends.

c) "The Rook"
This Starz series opens with a woman waking up with no memories and surrounded by dead bodies, and gradually finding out she's a British spy with telekinetic powers. Not super original as far as sci-fi goes, but a pretty good premise to start with and some interesting little concepts like 4 bodies sharing the same mind (played by 3 actors, one of them portraying twins). It's been a little slow going and humorless so far, though, at the end of the third episode my wife declared "I really want to like this show, but it's kind of boring."

d) "Florida Girls"
At this point making fun of Florida is a national pastime that's eclipsed making fun of New Jersey, so I was wary that "Florida Girls" would just be one big obvious joke about trashy Floridians. But the creator of the show is a woman from Florida, and while the show can be broad at times, it's also charming and the characters are grounded in some level of self-awareness, they're not total caricatures. It kind of feels like the show "Claws" probably would've been when it was developed as a half hour comedy, before it became an hourlong show and they ramped up the crime drama angle.

e) "What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage"
This show is a satire of "Talking Dead"-type recap talk shows that now often air after popular dramas, and host Fred Savage's show pretends to follow an imaginary hit FOX sci-fi drama called "The Flare." So "What Just Happened??!" opens each week with the final scene from an episode of "The Flare," a pitch perfect satire of big pompous network drama cliffhanger endings (in that respect, it reminds me of Savage's last FOX show, "The Grinder," which always opened with a scene from the fake legal drama show-within-the-show). They do some pretty amusing stuff with the concept, including making Savage a huge fan of the books "The Flare" is based on and being unable to mask his jealousy of the actor who got to star in the show. It's such an odd specific thing to satirize, though, it's kind of a concept that would probably go over better on Adult Swim, I can't see it lasting on FOX beyond this summer, but I enjoy it.

f) "The Disappearance"
This 6-episode miniseries has had a very slow international rollout, airing first in Canada, where it was produced, in 2017 and then in the UK in 2018, and finally now in the US in 2019. It's pretty stressful to watch a show about the disappearance of a little boy about the same age as my son, though, I don't know if I'll watch more than one episode.

g) "Frankie Drake Mysteries"
This Canadian series is about the Drake Private Detectives agency of Toronto, which amazingly has nothing to do with Aubrey "Drake" Graham. It's a pretty charming, cleverly plotted show, though, I like it.

h) "Grand Hotel"
"Grand Hotel" is based on "Gran Hotel," which takes place in Spain in 1906, and the new show transposes the story to present day Miami Beach. It's kind of a self-consciously trashy soap opera that doesn't take itself too seriously, fairly well made for the kind of show it is but I dunno if it's my cup of tea to watch regularly.

i) "Family Reunion"
One of Netflix's very old-fashioned live studio audience sitcoms, about a Seattle family who goes to a family reunion and Georgia and decides to stay. So, a lot of cliched notherners-in-the-south culture clash humor, not very funny.

j) "The Weekly"
Each episode of this show has a camera crew shadowing New York Times producers as they work on a major story. It's interesting to see how these stories come together, months after they've been published, just getting a peak behind the curtain, even with my experience in journalism I find it daunting to contemplate what goes into a 5,000-word NYT feature breaking a major story. The first episode with the school that was falsifying student records to help them get accepted to good colleges was bananas, I couldn't believe that shit.

k) "Shangri-La"
Rick Rubin has undeniably been a major force in music and has produced some great records. But over the years it's become kind of a running joke that he's this overpaid guru figure who big stars hire to sit on a couch and dispense faux-philosophical wisdom while someone else actually works on arranging and recording songs. There's a lot of different people hanging out at Rubin's studio in this show, it's unclear if he's actually working on all of their albums or if they just kind of staged conversations with them for the TV show, but there's still some interesting moments, like when David Lynch very forcefully says "I love ZZ Top, I love them." At one point Rubin basically says that his dream scenario is if he never meets or talks to an artist but somehow helps them make their best album, which is a hilarious thing for him to say that plays into all the couch jokes.

l) "Bring The Funny"
It's not a bad idea for NBC to try out a comedy reality competition show for comedy that's not strictly standup like "Last Comic Standing," but this show feels a little more bland and family-friendly, and while there were one or two sketch groups that I liked, for the most part it just felt like there was a much smaller amount of performers I found funny.

m) "Lone Star Justice"
An Investigation Discovery series about violent crime investigations in east Texas, I gave it a try but all these cops that the show tries to make look cool just seem terrible.

n) "Marrying Millions"
I kind of expected this to be a totally tawdry reality show, but they follow 6 relationships between someone who's a millionaire and someone who isn't and kind of observe all the good and bad that goes with that and whether people kind of accuse them of gold digging or expect them to be with someone in their own tax bracket, it's kind of an interesting empathetic show about a charged issue.

o) "LEGO City Adventures"
My kids and I love a lot of LEGO movies and this show is more or less in keeping with the humor of those but it's kinda bland and unmemorable by comparison, didn't hold our interest.

p) "Victor & Valentino"
Probably the best new Cartoon Network series of the last year or two, both of my kids love it, really enjoy seeing a really funny silly kids' show that's set against the backdrop of of Mexican folk tales.

q) "Pose"
I'm only a couple episodes into the new season but I like seeing the story move forward into the '90s, post-"Vogue" and all that, since that was something you kinda knew would be on the way during the first season. It feels like they're really overtly letting Billy Porter be the heart of the show more, now, too, which I think works.

r) "Sweetbitter"
I think this show's first season last year was a bit underrated, and I'm glad it's back, the first couple new episodes have been really good. With shows where the protagonist is the wide-eyed young rookie at a new job in the big city, I'm interested to see if the writers kind of try to suspend them in that role or allow for some character development, and I feel like they're letting Tess grow and change a bit while she's still surrounded by these characters that have more experience and history with each other.

s) "Grown-ish"
This show is alright, definitely better than it could've been, but it feels like it's trying too hard sometimes to be the voice of the youth and the feuding between the characters and love triangles is getting old. Don't know if the next spinoff "Mixed-ish" will be any good, I'm waiting on them to give "Old-ish" to Lawrence Fishburne.

t) "Harlots"
I just finally finished watching the second season a few weeks ago so the third season came right on time. I'm curious how long they're going to keep Samantha Morton offscreen and out of the action, though, it's already gone on longer than I expected.

u) "Big Little Lies"
At this point the stories circulating around the production troubles behind the second season of "Big Little Lies" are kind of getting more attention than the show itself. I think it's kind of funny that people started to buzz about something being amiss because the episodes have been shorter, though, I was ready to just be happy that a big deal cable show wasn't so self-important that it wanted to constantly make longer and longer episodes and was going in the opposite direction. It definitely seems like they should've just waited for Jean-Marc Vallee to be available to direct, though, he really brought a distinctive texture to the first season. I've liked the new episodes I've seen well enough, though. Meryl Streep obviously isn't going to join the cast and not steal the spotlight pretty often, but Laura Dern has really been the MVP lately as far as I'm concerned.

v) "Jessica Jones"
Haven't gotten too far into the final season, yet, but I'm still determined to at the very least finish this and "Daredevil" out of all of Netflix's now-canceled Marvel shows. I like the third season so far, the way they've kind of scaled back and focused more on Jessica solving cases.

w) "Minecraft: Story Mode"
This is like an interactive game made a few years ago with an overqualified voice cast including Patton Oswalt and Martha Plimpton that my Minecraft-obsessed son started watching on YouTube last year. And recently I was pleased to find that Netflix now has it available, with interactive buttons so you can actually play the game on Netflix just like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, so it's cool that they're even using that technology for existing games now.

x) "iZombie"
With "iZombie" in its 5th and final season now, it's kind of wild to think about how far the show has gone, like at one point it was about someone who was secretly a zombie hiding it from the world, and now it's about Seattle becoming a zombie city walled off from the rest of the world. But even amidst all of that, the silly episodic format of Liv eating brains and taking on the personalities of the victims has continued and gotten even broader and sillier. It can be a lot sometimes, but I still really enjoy this show.

y) "Drunk History"
I like that they've been doing short little mini-seasons every few months lately, a little of this show goes a long way. One of the craziest things about "Drunk History" is sometimes I look at the casting decisions and wish it was a full-on serious movie. Like, Tessa Thompson playing Eartha Kitt, that was perfect, I'd totally see that movie.

z) "Black Mirror"
I've never been big on "Black Mirror," but it's hard to walk away from the most popular anthology series on television when every new season brings a hotly discussed premise or two that piques my interest enough to check it out. The three latest episodes aren't really worth recommending, though -- "Striking Vipers" isn't sure whether it wants to be a love story or a gay panic joke and tries to be both, and the episode where Miley Cyrus plays a pop star whose big hit is a weird alternate universe version of "Head Like A Hole" by Nine Inch Nails is just a total stupid wash. Even the curiosity factor of whether she had other songs that were also warped NIN tunes didn't pan out, there weren't others as I'd hoped.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 22, 2019 at 7:25 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.